Auvik Network Management (ANM) Reviews

We use it for our small and medium businesses, specifically for data collection. We also use it for network mapping.

It's super helpful in the sense that you can look at the network and it shows you a graphical representation, so you know exactly how things are connected. It helps us stay more organized and more up-to-speed on what is in our clients' networks.

It helps keep device inventories up to date. The amount of data you get from it, whether it's network maps or the overall client information, helps you to solve tickets. We have two tiers for our tickets and we have a NOC team that assists us as well. That is how we run the business and the simpler tickets can be handled by the junior engineers.

Also, its ability to visualize network mapping and topology works extremely well. It's very comparable to SolarWinds, which is what I used in a previous position.

The whole troubleshooting process is made easier, and automation is part of that troubleshooting. And its automation has made us more available because it's enabling us to cut down on the time that it takes to resolve a help desk ticket.

We have absolutely seen a decrease in MTTR, thanks to the amount of data and the network maps. If an engineer is looking at a particular client location, they're able to ascertain, fairly quickly, where devices are located and how everything is connected. It just makes the whole troubleshooting process much simpler.

The data collection, as a whole, is valuable. 

The reports seem to be really comprehensive as well. There's a lot of information in terms of the make and model of a specific piece of hardware, IP address, subnets that a device is located on, and network map. It's a single, integrated platform and that is very important because the more tools that you can build into one product suite, the easier it is for your engineering staff to learn it.

It's extremely simple to use the monitoring and management functions of Auvik. Anybody with just a general IT background would be able to use it without a problem. This aspect of the solution is extremely important. As we're training new people, it's nice to have tools that are simple to use yet powerful enough to give you insight into your client's network. It would be a great tool for delegating low-level tasks to junior staff because there are so many built-in features and you get so much information out of Auvik.

Nothing really stands out in terms of a lack. If you want to be nit-picky, I don't know that there are any remote tools for directly connecting to workstations through Auvik. If there is, I have not used them, so adding a remote tool would be helpful.

I started with my current company about three months ago and that's how long I've had experience in Auvik.

It's extremely stable. I haven't had any issues at all. It seems rock-solid.

We have it deployed across at least 30 clients' systems, so it's definitely a scalable solution.

I have not had to call technical support yet because the product is fairly simple and straightforward.

The ROI would be high. Although I don't handle any of the billing our company receives, from a technical aspect, there is a lot of value from Auvik. I couldn't tell you how long it took to implement because I wasn't around for that, but the usefulness that I get out of Auvik is obvious.

I don't know what we pay for Auvik. But whatever the price is, it's worth it because we're getting a lot of value from it for that price.

In terms of technical insight, if you're looking for good insight into your client's environment, Auvik is a great solution.

Auvik has definitely impressed me. It seems like it's very lightweight, yet it gives you a lot of features.

Our primary use case is to have a monitoring solution for our managed service clients. That was something we were offering, but we weren't really doing well on that front, in terms of having a proactive monitoring solution. That was the primary pain point we were trying to fix.

The main benefit is that we are able to offer better proactive support. Previously, we would deploy a lot of Meraki firewalls and we wouldn't really have proactive support on that. Meraki only offers email alerting, so alerts would come in by email and we wouldn't see them and we'd have to devise other means. With Auvik, we provide a quicker turnaround time for network issues. 

It also enables our lower-tier techs to support everything. Normally, especially on the network side, the lower-tier techs are not as able when it comes to conceptualizing the network and visualizing how it's set up. Auvik's dynamic mapping really helps flesh that out. Even less-technically-oriented clients are able to look at Auvik and understand how their network is functioning, at least at a basic level.

In addition to the overall efficiency improvements due to the proactive alerting and the dynamic mapping, the ease of exporting the data that Auvik provides is a big benefit. There are several options throughout the product that allow you to export your data as an Excel spreadsheet. That means you can get the data that Auvik is using to show you everything. That makes it very easy to do asset inventory or to assess the end-of-life of certain products. It takes a lot of the human involvement out of those processes.

Also, in the past, there was a lot of effort that we'd have to put into keeping assets and inventory up to date, and it was mostly through manual data entry. Auvik cuts a lot of that out. Once you have the network monitoring set up, it has all that data that we would normally have to manually enter into ConnectWise, specifically. Now, that information can carry over automatically. So instead of having to do 10 or 15 clicks, and a bunch of typing for each configuration, you just get the network monitoring set up and set up the inventory syncing, and it happens in a couple of minutes.

By keeping inventories up to date, it saves us time. We heavily utilize ConnectWise configurations for determining contract renewals and we're able to focus more on that aspect, and less on ensuring accurate counts.

Another benefit is the ability to use the connector as a "jump-box "and get into other devices. Previously, we would have to either VPN into a network or get into the network through some other remote means, to troubleshoot and configure. But with Auvik, you have the ability to do quick, one-off troubleshooting commands. A technician can do that. You can also get into all the network devices and computers through Auvik itself.

And given the way it alerts, and how it shows the product, it does produce a lower mean time to resolution. 

Auvik has a dynamic mapping feature. Once you get things loaded, it will show you how everything is connected. It also shows the alerts on that map, making it a very quick and human-readable way to dig into it. Overall, that visualization is really nice, especially the dynamic facet. You don't have to make those connections manually. Auvik does all that automatically. The mapping is very intuitive. The filters have a little learning curve, but even the part that isn't immediately intuitive is not hard to pick it up.

Other useful features are the typical ones, like configuration management. It will keep track of configuration changes on devices and log them.

The alerting is also definitely important. The solution integrates well with ConnectWise Manage and with Opsgenie, which we use for alerting techs after-hours.

It primarily monitors network devices by SNMP and command-line interface. They only charge for network devices, such as wireless LAN controllers, firewalls, switches, and routers, but they'll also grab and monitor printers through SNMP, Windows devices, and Windows hypervisors through WMI credentials.

Auvik also has a really good feature for keeping device inventories up to date. We haven't used it too much, because of the way that we've set it up. Auvik ends up overriding some of the stuff we do internally, but it has a very good way of keeping assets and inventory up to date. The most useful is the ConnectWise integration. It can find certain values, like serial numbers and it will either produce it if it doesn't exist or create a configuration in ConnectWise to match the device. It's really good for keeping all of our products up to date with the information.

I would like to see more extensive syslog capabilities. It can ingest syslogs and I think it can alert based on quantities of messages. You can also look back at some of the messages, but it's not a forensics level syslog.

Also, when it comes to mapping and visualizations, there are some imperfections. If Auvik can't exactly deduce how something is connected, it will show an inferred connection and that makes the map a little messy, but with the preset filters, which you can use to only look at network devices or known connections, you can get all the clutter out of there. Overall, it does a great job, but it would be nice if it had a better export feature. You can export it in a usable format, but it's not on the level of a Visio drawing, if you are trying to produce a network diagram. There's a lot of "in-Auvik" usability, but not necessarily outside of Auvik.

I've been using Auvik for a little over a year.

We have had no issues of note, in terms of stability. There may have been one incident, but it was so minor that we don't even remember it. We have not had outage issues. They're usually pretty good about notifying you about outages and, usually, there are no adverse effects.

The scalability is great. It's designed for an MSP, so adding more clients is extremely easy. We have yet to have an issue. Granted, we're probably not one of their larger deployments. Maybe at scale, when you get bigger, there are some issues, but so far, with our setup, we've never had any issues with scalability.

It is a cloud solution with an on-prem agent that you deploy at each site. We have it deployed for about 30 clients, and there are multiple collectors per client.

So far, the tech support has been great. The only issue is that they have up to a 24-hour turnaround. Typically it's not that long but it's only available during business hours. For any type of issue we have, we can typically wait that long.

There would be an issue if a high-paying client had some sort of emergency situation.

Positive

We were dabbling in PRTG Network Monitor. We were not using it in the same way but we would use it for occasional troubleshooting and gathering the same kind of data. That was what we would recommend before having our own product: to do a PRTG instance, given they give you the first 100 sensors for free, which covers a lot of niche issues.

The initial setup is a straightforward process. After the Auvik code is implemented, it starts to populate network mapping within 10 minutes. Our average time for a full deployment is about an hour and a half.

At a lot of the places where we initially put it in, we didn't have great documentation on what was in that environment or how to get into the devices. If that information is already there, and especially if you have already had a solution in place, it should take less than an hour to get a site completely into Auvik.

There is no maintenance of the solution required at our end. Our support team of about 10 utilizes Auvik pretty frequently in the day-to-day. And client-facing managerial types, like chief information officers, use it quarterly to pull data and information. Other users include anyone else who needs to do troubleshooting or needs information. We have systems and network administrators who occasionally look at it, just to get a feel for the network.

The time-to-value was instantaneous. Once we got the deployment done, it immediately allowed us to better support networks in a proactive manner.

We were looking at a few options but it was hard finding the right balance. Some options had a lot of customization and you could get into the nitty-gritty. LogicMonitor was the primary example, but price-wise it was too much.

The other ones were open source and would have taken too much of a personnel investment. We would have had to dedicate someone to the role of understanding, maintaining, and updating the product.

Auvik hit a really good middle ground in that it had the usability and the features that we needed. And it's updated by them so we just have to use it. It's really an ideal solution given our setup.

Another reason that we picked Auvik was that its pricing is very good. The only non-open-source solution that had better pricing was PRTG, but Auvik had it beat in ease of use. All-around, Auvik has a really great price for the market.

In addition, the cloud aspect of Auvik is extremely useful in that we don't have to worry about downtime. We had a bunch of on-prem appliances at our main site, which wasn't really set up to be a data center. There would often be issues with unexpected downtime that would affect us, client-wide. Having Auvik in the cloud helped us immensely. Not having to worry about the infrastructure or the updates definitely takes a load off of our team. Those are areas where we previously had to put in notable effort.

The deployment of Auvik is much quicker than PRTG, given how PRTG sets up its agents. And once you pay for Auvik, there is no additional cost. SolarWinds is a little more complex and doesn't fit the same niche as Auvik. SolarWinds is more focused on a single enterprise, whereas Auvik is more MSP-focused.

Auvik gives us better insights into network device performance, so we can proactively catch issues before they become serious problems. Auvik also makes us more efficient by providing automated network maps and allowing us to automate low-priority tasks like configuration backups for firewalls and switches. That's a big one. We used to have to do that manually.

The solution's ease of use is essential because our company is split up into different operating groups. We have an IT and network team. This tool allows people who aren't necessarily familiar with firewalls and other IT solutions to get more information at a glance. You don't need to know the ins and outs of a Cisco ASA to figure out what's happening. It also has historical graphs and other features that are helpful for troubleshooting. 

Our customers are distributed and remote, and Auvik helps our onsite engineers support them effectively. It improves our IT support's overall availability because we can detect problems earlier. It's easier to fix something before it's broken completely. 

Auvik's automated network mapping has been helpful because we no longer need to do it manually. It can also monitor router switches, switch stacks, firewalls, and controllers. Auvik has a few other features that are nice to have, like the ESXI monitoring. The ability to monitor printer status, toner level, and aspects like that is also helpful. It fits our need for SNMP monitoring and then some.

I love Auvik's tools for visualizing the network mapping topology. Network visualization is relatively intuitive. It can get cumbersome on a larger network, but it lets you filter the map. If you aren't using any filters and have 1,000 devices, the network is just a bunch of tiny dots that you can't see. At that point, it's like trying to find a needle in a haystack, so you have to use the filters and zoom in. In my opinion, it's functioning as designed.

I don't like how Auvik handles their multi-site and site terminology compared to other tools. The sites are customers, and the multi-sites are generally partner accounts, but it could also be a customer account with multiple sites underneath it. Their documentation isn't clear on what to use in which scenario. It's up to your best judgment.

Other RMM tools like ConnectWise Automate have customers and sites. Auvik refers to customer accounts as the "multi-site," and the sites underneath are their actual sites unless you have a reason not to set it up that way. Then you can have all the sites under one site. It's confusing. 

I also think Auvik's integration with ConnectWise Manage could use some additional features for excluding certain configuration types. We have that turned off because it's overriding configurations when we don't want it to. I believe the ability to exclude those configuration types is on Auvik's roadmap. 

We've been using Auvik for about a year.

I don't need to contact support often, so that's a good performance indicator. I haven't had to troubleshoot it since the initial deployments. Usually, it's something like a particular device that doesn't have something enabled. 

Auvik is suitable for most MSP use cases depending on the size and maturity of the MSP. It's an excellent fit for the average MSP. I manage 60 environments with 412 devices. The device coverage varies. 

I rate Auvik support eight out of 10. I can't complain. They were able to fix my issues whenever I had them. I never had any long-standing tickets. 

In the past, we were primarily a ConnectWise shop. Automate does network mapping and SNMP monitoring, but it leaves a lot to be desired and requires a lot of manual configuration. 

We started looking into tools like Auvik and LogicMonitor. Ultimately, we went with Auvik because we felt like it was a good fit. The price was right, and it had all the features that we needed. We weren't using ConnectWise Automate's probe functionality often because there was too much setup involved. I would say it's more akin to us coming from nothing to something.

Auvik is relatively easy to use and deploy. If you're doing it as a Windows service, you can deploy the collector in under five minutes, but setting it up on a virtual machine might take around an hour. After you set it up, you need to configure it to scan the different subnets. 

You have to supply credentials and set the devices up to be monitored. It's reasonably straightforward. If we're deploying it for a net-new customer, we can usually get it done in an afternoon, depending on the customer size. Everything works out of the box, but we needed to set up integration with tools like Manage, ITGlue, and Opsgenie.

It's somewhat hard to estimate the onboarding time because we did it for us first as the MSP, then we onboarded many customers within the first month. It depends on the size of the customer, but it took about six hours.

There's a lot of work to do in the beginning. You have to fine-tune the alerts, which are slightly noisy when you first set it up. That part took a couple of months. We were starting from a blank slate because it was a new solution. We left the default settings and then adjusted them as we went along. It was a little bit of work spread out over a couple of months as we figured out what we did and didn't need.

After that, we didn't need to do much to maintain the tool. You have to check every time you add a new device to ensure it can be scanned. However, if configured correctly, the device will show up automatically when it scans again. 

We just did the onboarding through Auvik.

I don't have metrics about the return on investment, but Auvik's SaaS model saves us the cost and hassle of maintaining the infrastructure to host the solution. Auvik's team handles the security, so we're not paying somebody to manage it. 

That's the big advantage over an on-prem solution because then you have to dedicate resources to management. We only need to manage the configuration of the SaaS solution. We started to see value from the solution as soon as we deployed it because it met an immediate need. We were searching for a solution to proactively monitor networks. Auvik satisfied that need and more.

Auvik is worth every penny. I thought it was fairly priced compared to tools like LogicMonitor, which are a lot more expensive. It's reasonably priced for the market.

I rate Auvik eight out of 10. Before deploying Auvik, you should check to ensure it integrates with all your current solutions, including your RMM, documentation tools, and PSA. That's crucial because it's automating inventory and configuration updates. It integrates with ConnectWise Manage, ConnectWise Automate, ITGlue, Opsgenie, and Meraki, but I'm unsure which solutions are incompatible. 

We initially got Auvik to monitor our network devices and equipment mainly for outages and that sort of issue. We have integrated its alert system and email-to-text solution from a local New Zealand telecommunications provider so that our IT staff can get text alerts to their phones. It's quite handy because you're not constantly monitoring your email. So for our different alerts, we get texts now as well as part of that. It might be on the weekend or something like that, and you're not sitting there monitoring your emails, so texts are a bit easier for our on-call IT person to get a text, and then they can check out what's going on.

One of Auvik's services we use is TrafficInsights. It's reasonably new and wasn't around when we first got it. We can feed all the logs into there to see what connections are going and where things are connecting to the environment. It's pretty useful from a security perspective. For example, you can search and see when a specific IP address might have come into your environment if you need it to do an audit or a review. We generally use it for audits or checking where certain things are connecting from around the world. It's a good security feature we can use when we're worried about a device talking to a particular IP address. We can see how long it may have been talking to that. We haven't actually used it for network bandwidth as such.

Auvik also acts as a config register, connecting and pulling the configurations of switches. It's good to have that stored there. If we need to restore or roll back to a particular config, those are saved somewhere else in addition to saving it manually before we make changes.

Auvik has definitely saved us time. You don't have to go to a room somewhere and figure out what's under what. It's scanned, so it shows you everything, including what interfaces are hooked into what devices. If you didn't have that, you'd need to go into a room to look at a fizzled connection and find where it plugs into. Auvik has decreased our average time-to-resolution. For example, if we have an internet outage in our office. In that case, it shows that an internet connection has gone offline and tells us when we've got a failover internet circuit with different providers. 

In the past, we wouldn't have even been notified if we swapped over to one of the other internet connections. When troubleshooting, we know right away when something isn't working or hasn't come up online. We can see which connection is active or current and which is offline. I can't say precisely how much time we've saved using Auvik, but from a year's perspective, I've probably saved a couple of weeks' worth of time. It's reduced the amount of time I spend manually performing tasks like documentation, mapping things out, and troubleshooting. Auvik's features help us address issues before they become a problem for our users. For example, we have a resource usage alert that pops up when there's a sudden increase so we can jump on it. We can stop a non-essential service from taking up a lot of resources and could potentially freeze the server or device. It saves a lot of time addressing the issue after the fact while preventing potential impacts and outages.

It includes automated out-of-the-box device configuration backups for most things, including most generic Cisco functionalities. These have also saved us time. Before I joined the company, they had a separate service for that. They were paying for something else on top of other solutions. Having that all in the one system saves time as well. You don't have to worry about doing it manually. When we make changes to devices, it automatically rolls over to the next one. You can have a log of the dates and times when it changed, and you can set up notifications for when the configuration changes. You can investigate if it changes when it shouldn't have. Without that, you wouldn't even know it has changed without looking at it, but then I don't think you would anyway.

Our team is pretty small. We only have a small IT shop within our business, but we still have our services with Auvik. It makes it easier for them to fix problems quickly without trolling around and finding other documentation. They can jump in there and see the alerts on that map, giving a bit more information. It saves the rest of the team from constantly having to look at the networking.

Auvik is easy to use and provides us with an abundance of information. It can show what devices are connected to the network and the specific interface that it's connected to, saving us a lot of time. It's helpful if you're trying to troubleshoot and the documentation isn't a hundred percent up to date, like if you take over from someone else, and there's no documentation about how a specific device connects. If it's in Auvik and the network is set up, you can jump in there and find what it's connected to. It even maps it out for you in a pretty little diagram at the top. 

It's comprehensive. You load up a network, and it picks up pretty much everything. That makes it easier to use without having to do too much pumping. In terms of discovery, we only use it for certain things, such as our network gear and our servers. It picks up everything. You do have to do a bit of filtering and some tie-up to make sure you're not seeing stuff you don't want for your specific use case, but that comes down to what different people use it.

Auvik is constantly scanning automatically in the background, and if there's a new device in the network, it'll pick it up. You have to make sure that you have credentials or the right port sector so it can pull the correct information. It may be able to see the device, but it may not necessarily get the information from it.

TrafficInsights has helped us identify and troubleshoot performance issues. When we're doing maintenance, you can monitor it live and ensure that the performance isn't being affected too much. If it is, we can pause and decide to reschedule when there's not so much going on. With TrafficInsights, we can view the information and do something with it. In the past, we couldn't easily find that information. We'd have to dig through individual policies or logs, like on a firewall, for example, whereas it's now all in one place. That made it easier to be able to view that rather than clicking and moving between multiple places.

Auvik could have better compatibility with more devices. The devices that we're using are essential within our network infrastructure. It would be great to access the full range of features that some of the other ones do, such as the device configuration backups and the configuration change alert. But there are always new devices coming out, so they have to work through getting the compatibility in the first place.

It makes too many attempts to connect to devices when it's online. You want real-time alerting and that sort of thing, so it has a lot of active connections going on behind the scenes. It creates quite a bit of talk on the network when it's connecting to a device. When it's trying to connect to one for the first time, it tries all the credentials you have saved within your credential library, and that isn't always ideal. If you're on the device, you can see that there have been a lot of failed login attempts because it's just trying another credential that it shouldn't use.

We've been using Auvik for about a year and a half.

When we need Auvik, it's there. There is quite a lot of maintenance that goes on behind the scenes. We get alerts when Auvik is unavailable due to maintenance, but that's also a good thing in cybersecurity threat environments these days. Being in IT ourselves, we know how important that is. 

It's simple to scale up because you can add a whole network or office environment into it quickly. If you don't need it anymore, you can delete it. It's very scalable.

I would rate Auvik support eight out of 10. I've opened a couple of support tickets when we've needed certain things. They respond pretty quickly. We've also had chats with them throughout the setup process. The account managers have helped us get questions answered or pointed us in the right direction.

Positive

Before I joined the company, they had a PRTG system, which is similar in terms of the overall goal. But I had Auvik, which is a lot easier. It's all there. As long as you've got the network and a user to connect to something, then you're basically on your way, and you don't need to do much with the collectors either, which is the thing that talks and you install it and make sure it can talk to the right places on the network. You pretty much let it do its own thing. 

Ease of use and functionality were probably the main things that made us switch. PRTG is a product that requires you to set up a lot of things manually. There wasn't specific device compatibility. It was just standards, whether it was the way a device connected or the protocols through which it is connected to the device to pull the information. Auvik sets things up and has specific compatibilities with devices and a much nicer view to see the information that the old product didn't have.

Setting up Auvik is straightforward. It has decent documentation and specific instructions on how to configure it to work with compatible devices. You're not trying to follow some document for a completely different device and apply it to your device. There's lots of information to use to help you with that configuration process as well.

I can't say precisely how long it took to set up, but you can get a whole network mapped out pretty quickly. I've set up a few offices around the country. It took me a couple of hours to get everything fully monitored and plug the information in. To set it up, all you do is check a network, scan, and get some credentials. That takes less than an hour. Then you're just waiting for the information to start going in. With other products, you sometimes don't even know where to start, to be honest. If I were trying to do the same thing on another solution, I might end up spending an extra day on it for the same sort of setup, whether that's a whole office environment or setting it up from scratch.

We did the implementation ourselves. In the first year, there was a local reseller who sold it to us, but they didn't help us implement it. We have a four-person team for everything, so we take turns doing different things. In terms of maintenance, there isn't a lot we need to do on our side. Once we've got it set up and doing what we need, then there isn't a considerable amount. The only time we need to perform any maintenance is when we're setting up new equipment. On the other side, Auvik does its maintenance. So we'll get emails about them completing maintenance and the service availability and that sort of thing.

It's hard for me to estimate the return because I don't know what that service costs, but Auvik has replaced the separate service we formerly used for device configuration as well as our old network monitoring solution. I don't know the difference in cost between Auvik and our old solution, but Auvik saves a lot of time, and time is money. 

I'd say Auvik's price is reasonable. I don't know how much we paid for the old one, so I can't compare the two. But I think it's a good value, considering all the time saved and the information you can get from it. The license is billed according to the number of network devices. It bills you based on a few specific types of devices, like switches, routers, and other network devices. We're not even using all of our device allotment at the moment. I think Windows servers and machines and that sort of thing aren't counted as part of that licensing. We aren't charged for servers, I believe. We have a virtual environment, so all of our servers and virtual machines within that aren't part of that licensing scheme.

I think they were looking at about three solutions at the same time. They did a few trials a couple of years back. I can't remember which ones. I think there was a Solomon solution. They decided to go with Auvik because of all the information it displays and the ease of use. 

I'd probably give Auvik an eight out of 10 at the moment. We're still waiting for them to become compatible with all of our devices. If they had that compatibility, I'd probably rate it nine or 10. For those thinking about adopting Auvik, I would say go for it. 

My advice is to put time into setting up the alerts because that's one of the best parts about it. If you have those alerts set up, it's going to save you a lot of time. You don't even need to go into Auvik to investigate. With that notification, the process comes a behind-the-scenes method for resolving those alerts. You should have a plan so your IT team knows what to do when one of those alerts is triggered.

I use Auvik every day for everything. I can remote-terminal in, meaning I can be anywhere and jump in from my phone and make any changes I need to on switches.

We have some pretty large energy overhaul stuff going on right now. They're changing out all of our lights and adding big solar panels to all the parking lots at all of our school sites. It's nice being able to use Auvik to jump into those switches and change the VLANs when they need different sensors put in. Having that service is invaluable.

Auvik lets us know about problems before others find them. There have been some instances where I didn't set up an alert correctly, but as soon as I fixed it, it started giving us a heads-up before we got phone calls about the issue. That's the biggest advantage of having it. We don't get those calls nearly as often anymore.

The automation of network mapping frees up my time. I'm the sole network guy. We have some technicians that intermittently have an interest in networking. I have given them basic access to it so they can get in and see the maps, and they get the alerts too, so that they know what is happening at their assigned sites. Suppose a camera is down somewhere. They can go into Auvik because I have it set to hold devices for 10 days. They can see where it was connected and we can check the switch and see what the issue is.

Auvik also updates the maps almost instantly. Within about 30 seconds they're updated.

And in terms of reducing MTTR, we went from having nothing to having something. We would sometimes go a week or a month without knowing about an issue. I am able to track things down faster and implement solutions for things that I would otherwise have had no idea were even a problem in the first place.

The solution provides automated, out-of-the-box device configuration backups, as well. As soon as it starts scanning, it copies the running config on all the network hardware. I'm able to go in and restore them if I need to, but there's no setup for that feature. That has saved us time, absolutely. You can use that same panel to check differences. For example, when there's a configuration update, you can pull the backup and the current running, and run them together and it will highlight any differences.

The most valuable features of Auvik are the alerting and monitoring. Those functions mean it easily more than pays for itself. I have it integrated with Slack with multiple channels set up for our IT office. When just about any part goes down that I have assigned in the alerting portion, it will let the right people know within minutes.

It's also straightforward to use. That was one of the reasons I went with Auvik. It has a little link tree on the left side and you can pretty much navigate through the whole system. It's MSP software. Each of our school sites is set up as if it were a separate client. Each has its own webpage, and I can drop down the menu on the left and change to any school site to see its whole page. It's as straightforward as it gets.

The network discovery capabilities are pretty good. You do have to go in and allot permissions to scan separate subnets. If someone doesn't know what they're doing, they're not going to know how to get it to discover the networks. As long as you know what subnets you're supposed to be scanning, it's as easy as clicking a checkbox and hitting "Scan."

It would be cool if they came out with an app, but running the browser isn't bad.

I've been using Auvik for just over a year.

The stability is great. They're really consistent in sending out notifications about any maintenance windows or updates that they're rolling out. 

The only time I've had a false positive from Auvik is when our VM has gone down, the one that's running the collector. That will cause a bunch of things to pop off here and there. But I've cleaned that up on our end.

There was recently an issue with logging in, but they were on top of it within minutes and then they had a whole status web page about it. I can't complain at all about the stability.

Because it runs from a VM collector and it's fast, I could add another site if I wanted to and it would take me minutes.

In terms of increasing our usage of Auvik, we have a site that's running from a different ISP and I'm having issues remotely managing it. As soon as I'm able to get that straightened out, I'll be adding that entire site to our service.

Their technical support is awesome. They're proactive. If there's anything going on, they let me know by sending me emails. And if I ever need to hit them up, they're super quick. We have a designated rep and she's pretty responsive.

They recently added an idea portal. If I come across an idea or something that I want them to add in, I can throw it in there. Users then up-vote or down-vote ideas and Auvik chooses to implement them or not after that.

Positive

We had SolarWinds and then something happened to our database, internally, that we were using to manage it. We then went to having no monitoring at all for about two years. When I took over, we got with Auvik. So technically, we replaced all of SolarWinds' services with Auvik.

The setup was really straightforward. When we were doing the proof of concept, I went through their resources and got their certification by following their courses. And I pretty much did the entire deployment by myself, with a little help from their sales rep. But it was super straightforward. It took about 10 minutes.

The setup was super easy compared to others that I've done. With Auvik you're just putting a service on a VM. Depending on how large your network is you might need more VMs or more services running, but that's literally it.

And as a cloud-based solution it requires zero maintenance.

The time to value is great. We were up and running within an afternoon.

They charge for switches and some networking hardware, but everything else is free. In our environment there are a lot of things that we aren't billed for by Auvik. We're almost one-for-one on students. APs and cameras are shown by IP address in Auvik. It doesn't tell you exactly what that device is, but it does tell you there's something there and where it's connected in the maps. You can monitor any workstation using the service. If you can name them it makes it a lot easier to keep track of them. Intercom systems are included as well. All of those devices are not billed and we have thousands and thousands of those kinds of devices.

We had to look at other options. We checked out SolarWinds and we also evaluated NinjaRMM and PRTG. The latter teamed up with NetBrain and together they do network automation ticketing.

SolarWinds and NinjaRMM were significantly more expensive, although they did do more. But they were more server-related and covered more of that end. Auvik is more network-centric and checked more boxes, in terms of what I was looking for, than the others.

Give Auvik a shot. Do the demo. It doesn't take long to do the proof of concept. And during the proof of concept they give you access to their resources so you can go in and do that Auvik certification. The most important part of that is being able to go through all of their material and really see what they're capable of. During the demo you can dig deep.

I love it. I use it every day, multiple times a day.

It gives me an overall idea of our network. It shows me where things are at. It tells me about devices being down, e.g., printers. I also use it to see web usage, e.g., what sites people are going to. It has a lot of uses. I check to see the overall network topology, when things go down, or whenever I get alerts from Auvik.

I use the reporting part of it. Every day, I take a look at the reports every day.

We are using the latest version.

It makes it simpler and easier for me, as an IT person, to manage my network.

The automation of the network mapping enables junior network specialists to resolve issues directly, freeing up senior-level team members to perform higher-value tasks. This has made our operations easier, simpler, and faster.

As things change on a network, Auvik detects that and automatically changes based on those changes. It makes things a lot easier. You don't have to figure it out by mapping it out on a paper, etc. You can just go there and see how things are connected. So, it definitely helps.

When the systems go down, Auvik is a pretty useful tool. It lets me know ahead of time that I have an issue somewhere.

It is pretty easy to use. It kind of deploys itself. You put some passwords in there and it just kind of spiders out into your network, testing everything. 

Its network discovery capabilities are pretty good. It kind of spiders out and detects pretty much everything on the network, e.g., things that we are using and not using anymore. Its network discovery capabilities allow me to detect these things so I can track them down and shut them off.

The reporting needs a little bit of improvement. Sometimes, I get too many reports. Or, I don't get reports when I should be getting reports. I don't know if this is Auvik's fault or the devices that the reporting is coming from, but I have noticed there have been some discrepancies.

I have been using Auvik for five months.

I have had no issues with its stability.

I get emails letting me know that Auvik will be down for maintenance or updates. No maintenance is required.

Our environment is not very large. I am the only user of it.

I haven't needed to use the technical support.

We didn't previously have anything in place. We looked for a solution because we had nothing in place for network topology and reporting on systems being up and down as well as having the reporting on other things that Auvik does.

The initial setup was a little complex.

The deployment took four sessions, which were an hour long each.

Auvik suggested that we put it on a relay server, then we took it from there.

I did need some help from Auvik specialists. With some of the switches, I needed to get them in the device and reporting correctly. There were some problems, so a specialist had to get on and help me configure it.

Auvik has decreased our mean time to resolution by 50%.

I find Auvik kind of invaluable. It wasn't that expensive and did provide me with a lot of information. So, it is pretty beneficial.

We have licenses per year. It is on a network device, so we pay for switches and firewalls. Everything else is included, e.g., computers, access points, and printers.

Auvik offers a trial period. I recommend taking advantage of that and seeing if it works for your environment.

I looked at competitors. Other providers had multiple systems. I just wanted a single system to do everything. So, Auvik was an all-in-one package.

The TrafficInsights feature shows us network bandwidth usage without the need for expensive, in-line traffic decryption. I use it to see what sites people are going on and how to block certain things, like social media. Though, it is not that important to us, because we don't have an issue with our bandwidth. So, if we had an issue with our bandwidth, I would have to monitor it more, but we don't at the present time.

Auvik is very useful. I would rate it as eight out of 10.

We are using it for monitoring and troubleshooting. It is cloud-based, but the collectors always have to be on-premise. We must be using its latest version.

It automatically updates your network topology, which has made any kind of troubleshooting or planning way more efficient. To make sure that everything is up for you, every 15 seconds, it checks for a device to be online and any network element to be up or down, and every minute, it checks for your other devices, such as your PCs or IP phones. It does a subnet scan every 600 seconds to see if thresholds are being pegged or have fallen off in certain levels. If you don't want to have so much ping traffic on your network, you can change that to whatever value you want. All that is customizable. It kind of becomes something you depend on when you're looking for a device. If I want to find out where a device is plugged in specifically, Auvik is the first place where I would go to check if I can see it there. Earlier, if I'm looking to see where a device is, I used to check my windows DHCP server and look for an odd or new IP address that had appeared. In Auvik, I can filter the map based on a device, subnet, or VLAN, or I can see all devices that are plugged into a specific switch, which is really convenient.

It has significantly decreased our mean time to resolution. In the past, sometimes, it took us a long time to come to the conclusion that this is the problem. When trying to go through the troubleshooting steps to know what the problem is, when Auvik has that information for me, troubleshooting is significantly quicker. I don't have to go through an entire department and look at their connections to see how they're impacted and then decide that everything they have in common is this switch. Auvik is able to tell me that this switch isn't online anymore. I can then say that we have a problem with a switch, and we're working on it to kind of calm folks down.

TrafficInsights dashboard is one of the first things that I log into every day in Auvik. Before going with Auvik, I tried a different solution for it, and that solution was just terrible in comparison. It only permitted five interfaces for traffic insights, and if you wanted more than five interfaces, it costed more money. It was just completely unreasonable. Auvik doesn't limit you on the number of interfaces for traffic insights. I get a better idea of the type of traffic on the network through Auvik than anywhere else. I can look at the type of traffic through my firewall monitoring, but I'd have to go a lot deeper into the protocols and ports that are being used just to see what's going on in the network.

With Auvik, if I look at traffic insights, I can get a good graph of how much traffic is happening at specific times a day. I can lay out the type of traffic and break it down based on the applications. I can then filter from there. If I'm seeing that we have a lot more web traffic or media streaming traffic, I can look a little bit deeper and see the exact applications, such as Netflix, YouTube, and TikTok. I can then see who is watching Netflix. It makes it a whole lot quicker than watching my firewall because I'd have to filter by a domain or IP address to come to the conclusion that someone is watching Netflix on the network. In Auvik, based on the filter, I can get all devices involved with that conversation to Netflix, which is a really nice feature. The other menus within TrafficInsights allow you to keep it all relative, so you're not resetting or recreating those filters. I can just filter based on Netflix and see who are the top users. I can see who is using Netflix and on which laptop they are using it.

The TrafficInsights feature helps in improving our overall network performance. It allows for me to look at a month's worth of time, and then I get an idea of what's the normal baseline. It helps me in getting a good baseline for expected backups because I can see when the backups are happening and how much traffic is related to backups. So, I can see when things are normal or abnormal. For example, when media streams are a little high, that's abnormal, so I will look into it a little bit deeper. It helps with this kind of stuff, and if there is any kind of impact on overall throughput for other users, I get to nip it in the bud right away, which is valuable. 

The out-of-the-box device configuration backups save time and money too. With Auvik, I can see the configurations even if I have them saved on the file server or something like that. If I got a protected share that has configuration backups, being able to deploy that configuration or even save that configuration as a text file from Auvik is a time-saver. I am not paying for the other product any longer just because Auvik handles that. Previously, I would have been paying for both. If Auvik couldn't do that, I'd have to pay for two products, so it saves money, but more importantly, it saves time. I don't have to spend so much time going switch by switch.

The best feature is the support access. Access to Auvik support is right there within Auvik. It has a little support button at the bottom, you push it, and you get connected with a support agent. They can see your internet. They help you out, work with you, and answer your questions right there. I don't have to go and open up a ticket somewhere else and try to explain anything, which is a great feature. I can get someone in less than a minute, which is really helpful.

It is very simple. It is very easy to learn how to navigate, and their knowledge base is a good resource. 

It is an SNMP-based platform. It can communicate with almost any device that you're trying to monitor, such as a switch or a router, through SNMP. If you're trying to monitor Windows machines, it uses WMI. It gives you a good layout of the sensors for a lot of devices. It can generate alerts based on if the fans are working, CPU is hot or highly utilized, or RAM is highly utilized.

The Syslog feature is also really valuable. I don't have to go into each individual box, so I have it all centralized. Everything is in one pane of glass. When I first started using Auvik, they didn't have the Syslog fully deployed. It was a beta. Now, it is fully deployed, and it is a great feature. Auvik really relies on SNMP in order to give you good information about a device, but our IP phones, for instance, don't support SNMP. With a phone pointed towards Auvik for the Syslog info, I can see the stats within Auvik, whereas before, I would have to go into the phone server and the phone to get an idea of what's happening with that phone. So, if someone is telling me that his phone keeps restarting or has bad call quality, I can go to that phone's Syslog within Auvik because even the phone itself doesn't store that information. Our phones only show the last six reasons for a reboot, and if someone is saying that reboot is the issue, then that's not good enough. You want to look for a pattern. You want to look for what might be happening internally on the phone. For that, you would have to go into the phone server and then get down to those logs. If the log info is already sent to Auvik, I don't have to go into the phone server and then write up a command to filter it down to just this little tiny query here. I could just look at that device, access the log info, and get what I need, which is very valuable.

It also gives you a live or close-to-live topology map. So, you can get down to things. For example, if all of a sudden a machine is really slow during the day for someone, or they lose connectivity, you can check out the machine baseline by name or by IP. When it is on a switch, you can check the port it is on and get the logs on that switch to see if there are any errors being generated on that port. So, it is just a lot quicker than going into the switch's interface. You can get information on the device via Auvik without going into each device separately. You can get a log, but you can't do any configuration changes. You can just get information on the devices, and then if you see that you need to make a configuration change. If you want, you can also tunnel in through that or do it externally. The ability to launch a console session to your switch, router, or any device that you're monitoring (if that device supports it), or launch a browser session through Auvik to that device is a nice little feature they have. You can interface right there through that single pane of glass.

It backs up my configurations for me. For the routers, I have a cloud-based subscription, and it backs up my configurations every 30 days. So, I can see the changes that were made, and then I can do an A/B comparison of the configurations and identify exactly what was changed. I can even redeploy the configurations from within Auvik, which is pretty handy.

I liked the Teams integration that exists in Auvik. We have Office 365, and I can create a channel within Teams where my alerts from Auvik pop up in Teams so that I can see a feed of different alerts. I have a feed of different levels of alerts such as emergency, critical, warning, and informational that are generated in Auvik, and if I'm not viewing the tab in my browser that has Auvik, and they pop up as alerts in Teams on my desktop. I might have a ton of tabs open, and if I am not viewing the tab that has Auvik, these alerts will pop up in Teams, and that'll get my attention. It also has the ability to send a text alert. It is indirect, and even though it comes to you in SMS or MMS format, Auvik sends it to an email address, and you can get around by using your MMS email address based on your service provider. So, staying informed about the environment when I'm not directly looking is definitely a valuable resource for me.

One of the great things about Auvik is the shared collector mode, which is useful in an environment that has more than one physical location. We have 15 different locations, and I can have all of those locations pointing to one collector. So, all these locations are sharing this one collector, and I can get a map, which is way out on top of the map that you would see in Google maps, to see all my locations. I can see alerts on that map for any of those 15 locations. I can zoom in right there to the location, and from there, click on it. It is really handy.

They don't let you customize the dashboard, which is like the homepage of Auvik. There is one feature that I don't use that's on the dashboard, and it is for SSL VPN services. The way it is designed is that if you have a separate, dedicated SSL VPN appliance, they can see that. I'd rather not have that take up any space on my screen because it never is going to populate with any kind of information. I'd like to move some things around on the dashboard, but I can't do anything like that. I know that they don't plan on doing it, but if they could open the dashboard just a little bit and allow us to customize it a little bit, it would be incredibly helpful, but it is not something that I feel I'm truly missing.

I wish they did have a few more integrations, and I'm sure that they're going to have more coming down the line. It was last month when I had a meeting with them, and their goal is to just kind of make it as universal as possible. So, they take some customization features or limit some customization features just because they feel that if they make it something you can customize, it might make it less universal. You can use their integrations with other applications. It integrates with the popular RMM solutions, and that's great, but when you are viewing Auvik through that integration, there is no way for me to limit or control how Auvik sees a location. So, I can't just have it default to a certain view. If you're looking at a specific department, I can't have everything automatically filtered down to that specific department. I'd have to go through and add those filters for Auvik to do so.

Most of the issues that I have had are related to the dashboard and wanting a bit more customization available through the dashboard because that's where you'll spend most of your time. Auvik is on the dashboard, and you can create and save these filters, which is great, but if I were to filter the map by all switches, the information below doesn't reflect the filter. I have to select the device within the filter, and then it starts to show the results. I can then see the dashboard of that device. If I were to filter by switches, I would like my top device utilization to only show me switches from my alerts and anything related to my map filter. That was something I asked about in one of the meetings with Auvik last month, and I don't think they have any plan to expand the dashboard anytime soon or at all. So, that was a little bit of a letdown. So, I am adjusting my workflow to fit the product and its abilities, but it really makes sense to me to expand it over time within the TrafficInsights dashboard. If I filter by my access points, then it should only show me the information related to my filter.

Another limitation, which is probably still under customization, is related to the reporting features. It doesn't really give you the ability to customize reports, create reports, or schedule reports. Adding those kinds of elements to it would really take it over the edge. It has some built-in reporting, and you can generate a report based on just a few things. You can do 10 reports that are built-in, but you can't create a report, and you can't customize a report. You can export the reports. It is designed that way. I would like to be able to create and schedule some custom reports. There should be the ability to do a temporary report. For example, if I am monitoring one or multiple devices for a week and I had the map filter to these devices, I'd like to be able to just quickly generate a report to be able to see how this device communicates, or how these devices are communicating over the course of a week. Such a feature would be really good. Reporting is the main thing that you're looking for in a monitoring system, and Auvik falls short there.

I probably have to look through the knowledge base to see if it does exist, but I do not believe there is a way for me to set a threshold for certain types of traffic. For example, when media streaming gets to a certain percentage of network traffic, I get an alert. That's why I'm kind of in it all the time. It is one of the tabs that I have open, and then I just take a look and see what is a little high and then zoom in.

Auvik doesn't deploy firmware upgrades and things of that nature. I don't know what would be required to allow them to be able to handle firmware upgrades for all these different devices, but it is probably not necessary for them to go that far because they'd have to open it up for so many different vendors.

I have probably been using this solution for a little bit over a year.

It has been incredibly stable for me. They do maintenance just about every weekend for adding new features or just cleaning some bugs up.

The whole ability to add more locations is really impressive. I know that people can have multiple collectors, but for me, I just have one collector and 15 sites sending information to that one collector. I can expand if I need to add more devices at a location or add a new location entirely. I can even reduce, which is great.

When I first set up Auvik, during that trial, I was seeing everything from one site. After a discussion with the guys in support, they recommended that I basically change the mode of Auvik to be a shared collector and make the other locations sites. This way I can just look at one site at a time, or I can come to the main dashboard and see all the sites from a bird's eye view. I can just continue to expand or compress based on my needs and preferences.

Access to Auvik support is right there within Auvik. It has a little support button at the bottom that you can click to connect with a support agent. You don't have to go and open up a ticket somewhere else and explain anything. You can get someone in less than a minute.

They've been great. All of my questions have been answered, and any issue I've had related to a feature within Auvik has been resolved for the most part.

The other product that I was using was a product created by the manufacturers of the devices. It was something that I thought would be perfect for the devices, but it wasn't. Auvik is superior across the board in comparison to that device. The only thing that Auvik doesn't do, but the other device can do, is deploying firmware upgrades and things of that nature. It is probably not necessary for them to go that far because they'd have to open it up for so many different vendors. I was using a vendor product for certain devices, and it wasn't reliable and viable.

I was involved in the initial setup of Auvik at my location. It was straightforward, and I was surprised by how much information Auvik can give you. The way they deploy is the smartest way to deploy anything. You go through that trial period with them where you'll give it all the time to gather the information about your gear. When you're actually talking to the guys, they give you a demonstration of Auvik in your environment related to your gear and the information Auvik will use, which is very important. 

Before we got down to the purchase, I wanted to see information related to the gear that I actually have, and that's important for anybody. I didn't want to see the hypotheticals of if we had a specific gear. Instead of deploying it in my environment with the belief that it is going to be great, and then realizing it is not compatible with this, I wanted to know that first, see it, and then decide whether or not that's going to be a deal-breaker. For example, I might get to know that Auvik is not going to show me information about the access points that I have because the manufacturer's access points don't have a feature that allows Auvik to see that information.

In terms of the duration, we gave it a weekend. There are different methods for using Auvik, and you can spin up a Linux box and install Auvik that way, or you can use their appliance. Based on your environment, they have their recommendations, and then you just let it sit for some time while you configure all your devices to communicate with Auvik. The setup configuration took me half a day. I had to make sure that I had the traffic all permitted through the firewall, the switches and routers were all set up to send information to Auvik, and SNMP communication was all good. After all that was set up, I just had to wait for Auvik to gather the information. I come in on Monday, and I saw all the information Auvik gathered about the network topology and other things over the weekend.

Comparing Auvik's setup time with other solutions, I haven't seen better. Auvik does the work for you. I spent half a day setting up the SNMP information and entering whatever credentials I needed to enter into Auvik for the WMI communication. After that point, you'd have to kind of trim it down. You have to say that I don't want to see the subnet because it'll scan everything. When you give it the information to look at your route, it'll be able to grab any route that your router can see. If you're not concerned with the public WiFi that you might provide and that your router might handle, you can just eliminate that from the map. You just say don't scan the network, and this way, you're only looking at the data that you want to see, which is really handy. So, in terms of the setup time, it is about how fast you can get into your devices and how quickly can you enter the credentials into the devices that you manage.

Its pricing is very reasonable. We had looked at other solutions where you pay based on the amount of traffic that was filtered through and analyzed. With Auvik, we pay by a billable device. For one of the locations I have, one network element would likely be a billable device. So, every billable device has a network element, but not every network element is a billable device. If I have a location that has 50 network elements, then maybe 30 of them are billable devices. PCs, VoIP phones, and access points are monitored at no charge. 

You pay based on billable devices, and that is very reasonable. You can control that to a certain extent and make a device unmanaged, but you don't get the benefits of Auvik being able to collect all of the information to make it useful. It'll tell you that this is an unmanaged device. You might know it is a switch, but it is not giving you any switch information. 

When you make a device managed, then it is a billable device. It is important to the whole cost of trying to replace your devices or expand your locations. You have to consider the cost of that switch. You have to think that if you are going to buy a switch, it is not just the price of this switch; it also becomes something that's billable in Auvik. Would you buy another switch, or would you replace the switch and buy a bigger switch? Auvik just continues to collect the data and continues to give you traffic insights, Syslog, and all other features that you want. It is worth it.

There was one other solution that was evaluated in terms of install, deploy, and configure. Other ones for which I had seen demonstrations weren't what I was looking for. They could do things similar to Auvik, but they weren't what I was looking for at the time.

When you're doing the trial, the trial is using your info. I would just say at least do the trial and see what it shows you and really explore all of the sub-menus. If you're looking for insight and alerting based on thresholds and health checks, it is definitely something worth looking at. It might take you some time to configure devices to communicate with Auvik, and then just let it do its thing and watch.

It is a little difficult to say whether Auvik helps us in putting out fires before people or end-users even get to know that there is a problem. If you are at your computer and your switch goes down to which it is connected, you're going to know at the same time I get to know, but I will know what happened. That is the kind of fire that it helps me put out. When I'm not looking at Auvik or any kind of monitoring system, if your switch goes down, you would come up and tell me that you don't have internet. I won't know why you don't have internet until I go in and see that all people don't have internet, and that switch is offline, but Auvik will let me know if there is an outage right away.

I would rate Auvik a nine out of 10. The only thing that keeps it from being a 10 is just the lack of some customization in certain areas. That has really been the main limitation for me. It is not that big a deal, but that would just get it right to a perfect score. I find it very valuable in terms of how quickly you can set something like this up and how much information you can see within your network from a single pane of glass. I still open up my other monitoring tools that are built into the devices, but I don't really view them as much as I view my firewall monitoring in Auvik. 

I have access to Auvik as the system administrator to use it to view my network and manage the various pieces of it. 

I needed a solution like Auvik because I wanted real-time network mapping. At the time, we were using Visio diagrams, which are obviously very hard to keep updated. And so to have something that is running the cloud in real-time on what our network looks like was something I really was interested in.

When I have my backups run nightly, Auvik is able to tell me specifically which ports on the switches are being utilized. I'm able to label that so when I see traffic on my network at 10:00 AM, 10:00 PM, or in the middle of the night, I know it's regular traffic and not something that could possibly be an issue.

It helps to put out fires before people or end-users even know there is a problem because of how things work with notifications and everything. Through alerts and automation, we are able to resolve before a lot of people are aware of an issue.

The most valuable feature is that it maps out of the network. It is very helpful to see an actual visual representation of how our network is connected. The traffic insights dashboard is also valuable so that we can see the breakdown of the traffic over our network.

Auvik is very easy to use. The URL or the page is very intuitive and very easy to navigate.

The network discovery capabilities are very good. After I put new devices on the network and I want to see them within 20 minutes or so, it picks it up. It's very good.

Auvik automatically updates our network topology. This has shortened our operations. Our network is more organized and it allows ease of finding issues or finding the path of the network that the traffic is taking. It takes a lot less time to figure that out.

It decreased our mean time to resolution. The particular piece of it usually takes me a while, so it saves around 20%.

The traffic insights feature shows us our network bandwidth usage without the need for expensive inline traffic decryption. It's very important to us. Knowing exactly what's going on, what traffic is flowing over my network is very much an important thing for me to know. We know that policies and procedures are being followed. And so we know that nobody is doing anything that they shouldn't be doing on a company network.

The traffic insights feature helped to show where our system is experiencing performance issues. We are able to see by looking at the daily reports that we run where we're slow or what pieces of equipment have a slower connection than others.

I was able to tweak a few of that so that's increased it by around 20%.

I don't really have any points of improvement. The few times I've had to call their customer service or use their customer service, they've been pretty prompt and I've been able to get issues resolved pretty much with one phone call. So I don't have any issues there. 

I have been using Auvik for around one year. 

Everything's always been available. The maintenance windows have always been adequately advertised beforehand, so I haven't had any issue with availability.

It's very scalable. With the way they have it set up as you need it on the managed devices, scalability happens very quickly. You can add endpoints as needed.

I'm a small shop so we have between 150-200 endpoints. We don't have any substantial plans to increase usage at this time. 

Every time I've had to call them with questions or issues I've been able to resolve everything with one phone call. I've never really had long hold times or anything like that. I'm very happy with their support.

The ease of use is definitely higher with Auvik as well as the price points, which is why we went with Auvik. A lot of the other solutions we looked at were much more expensive. 

The initial setup was very straightforward working with our Auvik tech. We walked straight through it. I think it got done fairly quickly and fairly easily. We had it up in less than one day.

It requires no maintenance. With me not having to manage it, it's something that's always available. So the fact that I don't have to take my time away to manage it, is always a bonus.

The time savings that the setup has saved us comes out to around $2,500 per year. 

With the troubleshoot time being lessened, we were able to get a pretty decent ROI.

When taking into account Auvik's setup time and automated network mapping and documentation, if I were to compare setting up a map, how we did it previously with Visio, that would take at least a few days of my time versus having it done automatically for me with Auvik. I'm not quite sure how that equates to dollars and cents. But it's at least three or four days of work that's not needed to be done.

Pricing makes sense. I know they do it by managed device. Compared to everything else that we saw out there, they were very competitive with how they ran things. I think what they charge and everything makes sense.

There are no costs in addition to standard licensing. 

The only difference between Auvik and the other solutions that stick out is that a lot of the more expensive ones have more AI built into them to allow better troubleshooting of network issues. Auvik doesn't seem to have that, but I'm sure that for the price, you get something very good. Auvik has less AI than what's readily available. I'd like for Auvik to incorporate more AI. I'm definitely a fan of more AI being integrated.

Keeping in touch with our original Auvik rep has helped. He's been my main point of contact when it comes to anything else I've needed with Auvik because obviously, they know. Instead of going through the standard support stuff, actually having somebody to email and contact has always been beneficial. 

I would rate Auvik a nine out of ten. AI implementation would make it a perfect ten.

We're a cloud service provider, so we wanted a solution that would proactively be able to notify us of potential issues. We have four core cloud platforms that we provide. We wanted something that could look at both the network connectivity as well as the infrastructure and storage layers.

As a cloud provider, it's of paramount importance that we're connected to the internet and the cloud in general. If the data collectors ever go offline, there's an alert that's actually sent out to us. Because of the alert tiering, we can have it so that that's treated as an emergency alert and it goes to a different set of critical recipients. We've had it where it's assisted us when we were having issues with one of our IP transit providers, and we were able to use the logs that it provided to demonstrate that we had a definitive issue with the provider and their connectivity. That actually enabled us to push back on the IP transit provider and get quite a substantial claim approved because we were able to demonstrate how unstable the link was.

The other element that it's helped us with is in predicting the future. And another thing that it allows us to do very easily is to track our bandwidth usage that's going in and out of each of the data centers. We've been able to use that information to trend and predict when we need to get upgrades in place. Funny enough, we have an order now where we're increasing our connectivity at one of our data centers tenfold and that's being driven because Auvik's enabled us to understand that we're rapidly approaching our threshold.

The mapping tool does make it easy and convenient to access and get console-level access quickly and easily because of the way it works within Auvik, it embeds the credentials. It's a couple of clicks of the mouse button and you're on a console session. You don't have to go through that rigmarole of what's the IP address, how do I connect, what do I use PuTTy, do I use Telnet? What are the credentials? With Auvik it's very streamlined, click, point, click and you're on.

We've saved on intangible costs. The overhead of managing three different open-source platforms has now completely gone. We just have a SaaS platform, we pay our fee, and it does exactly what it says it will do.

It carries a high value ratio on time-to-value. The interesting thing with the price model is that that value ratio could change. It depends really on if you have a hundred switches, it's going to be a lot more expensive than a client that's only got two large switches. But for us, we find it's very high value for money and good value for money.

The auto-discovery and the mapping are quite nice. We can see how our data centers are connected. That was one of the immediate appeals. 

The change control that's built into it for picking up network device changes and recording is something else that we found to be extremely useful.

It's extremely easy to use, although sometimes some features can be a little bit hidden. You have to know where to look, but generally nine times out of ten, it's very straightforward and quite intuitive.

Network discovery is very good. Like anything that does auto-discovery, it can at times get confused, but it's very easy to select to do an override. If it mis-detects a firewall as a generic network device, it's very easy to correct that on a manual basis. But that happens quite infrequently.

It automatically updates our network topology. We're quite lucky we don't have too many issues. It has given the guys on the desk confidence that they can see very quickly and access any system that we've got monitored. In the early days, we had a hesitancy to know if we could rely on Auvik, but over the last couple of years, it's proven itself time and time again. If it tells us there's an issue, we trust that.

In certain circumstances, it has decreased our mean time to resolution. The bulk of our issues unfortunately tend to be more of an application layer, which Auvik doesn't have visibility into.

Auvik enabled us to consolidate or replace other tools. In the early days, we used to use a SaaS platform called LogicMonitor, which we then reverted from and pulled to an in-house solution. That ultimately became three open-source in-house solutions. It was at the point that we wanted to look at something that could consolidate and give us more intelligence and that's where Auvik came into play.

We use network mapping slightly differently from a lot of MSPs who are more focused on using Auvik to maintain end-user environments. We're looking at it maintaining quite a complex data center environment. The mapping is good, but that can mean that it can get a little bit unwieldily. So having the ability to be able to have more manual control on how the map is organized, would be really useful for us. 

It uses SNMP in its discovery process and how it pulls in data. But today it doesn't have an SNMP trap facility so you can't have your infrastructure devices push alerts into Auvik. And that for us would be a big feature that we would like to see.

The single sign-on piece that they have is really good. That works really well for us. Everything else we're really happy with. They have the chain of control stuff and configuration management piece, which was really nice to discover. We never knew about that. That was one of those things that we fell across and then make use of that quite extensively.

We've been an Auvik customer for approximately two to two and a half years.

We haven't had any issues with availability. They do regular maintenance, but we always get proactively notified of it and it's never caused us an issue.

We use it to monitor two data center sites that have somewhere in the region of about 300 to 500 infrastructure devices in each and we never had a problem with it. My understanding is that if we went out to 20 data centers, it would scale without any issues.

It requires zero maintenance. We would have to do regular patch management with our on-prem solution. It wouldn't take up a huge amount of time, but it was something that had to be scheduled on a monthly or bi-monthly basis.

Technical support is extremely good. Any ticket that we've raised, whether it's a query or we feel that we've hit a bug, has been responded to promptly. They have an extensive knowledge base set of articles, which are invaluable for pointing you in the right direction.

We saw Auvik through one of our partners. We sell to IT resellers, and it was seeing the ease that they could actually access some of the information for a shared client that put us onto doing the evaluation. The one-week evaluation turned into a purchase.

The initial setup was very easy. We downloaded an OVF file, deployed, and connected. We had someone from their tech teams, once we had done the deployments, work with our service desk team and work through doing the initial config.

We had the collectors deployed in under a couple of hours and the configuration for each data center to set things up took us a week for each data center. That was a process that was hindered by us because we had to tweak and tune things to meet our requirements.

Compared to LogicMonitor, my experience was pretty much on par. The SaaS providers tend to have quite a streamlined model. You deploy a data collector, which they have as a single download, and then it starts to consume data into the SaaS platform. For SaaS to SaaS, it was pretty much the same. When you're doing your own on-prem deployment it's vastly more efficient. 

We think the pricing is actually really cool. Only certain network devices make the pricing really cost-effective for us. We can monitor 50 servers and essentially one server or 50 servers has no impact on costs. The one thing I think that's crucial is just to make sure that you understand how many billable network devices you have in your estate before you move forward.

Typically, in our environment, VM hosts, storage arrays, virtual machines, or physical like Windows or Linux machines, all have no impact on cost. The only things that really impact costs are our network switches and our firewalls.

My advice would be to verify that it can cover all the devices that you want it to monitor. For us, it does virtually everything that we need and the odd exception hasn't caused us any major problems. We're still able to do basic monitoring. We just can't sometimes get the level of detail that we want. Go back to the environment and make sure that you understand your network and your network devices so that you can make sure that it's going to give you the value that you want.

The biggest lesson we've learned from Auvik is that we had an assumption that because it talks to the devices and discovers them using SNMP as one of its main mechanisms, we assumed that it would do this SNMP trap feature. We were surprised that it didn't. It hasn't caused us any major issues, but we do welcome the day that that's actually added as a feature.

I would rate it an eight out of ten. Not a ten because of the lack of the SNMP trapping and the fact that it's got a lot of flexibility on the devices it monitors, but there are a couple of holes. It's not a big issue for us.

Our use case is to monitor and maintain not only our corporate headquarters, but all of our remote sites and embedded sites across our company.

It's a SaaS application.

It has definitely helped us to put out fires before people even know there is a problem. It helped us to discover a lot of network problems with one of our buildings so that we could have it rewired.

We're a pretty small team, there are four of us in IT. I'm the primary network person and then I have a backup. Auvik does help him and other members of the team, and our developer. We all wear multiple hats, but we have our specialties. It helps everybody on the team when I'm not able to get to something, and somebody has a network issue. It helps everyone else to diagnose the issue if I'm tied up working on something else.

The solution has also decreased our mean time to resolution by at least half. We're able to very quickly see what's going on. We can see the connections within the image it shows, but we can also deep-dive quickly through the TrafficInsights and the logging. Even if you quickly go ahead and make a decision to reboot something to restore service, you can still capture logging and things that would normally be on the device, so that you can quickly figure out what happened. That helps with root cause analysis for after the fact so that you can come up with plans to avoid the issue going forward. That's the kind of thing we didn't have before. Before we'd have to make a quick decision regarding, "Do we troubleshoot this to figure it out or do we go ahead and just reboot it?" Nine times out of 10, that'll probably resolve your issue.

It's a network monitoring system, so being able to see things like the hardware lifecycle, if our equipment is up to date, if connections are broken, or whether there are physical line breaks, is helpful. We're able to determine connectivity issues. We can monitor pretty much anything that is network-related.

It's fairly easy to use out-of-the-box.

We also use the TrafficInsights feature and it has been a huge help to us. Using it, we can see interface utilization, both WAN-facing and LAN-facing. We can see what kind of bandwidth we're using and what is using that bandwidth: what type of application, what host is using it, and how long it's been using it. And the historical data of TrafficInsights is great as well.

With TrafficInsights, we can obviously tell when our backups are running, because we run nightly backups and hourly backups. We can see the performance utilization of our backup server. And we can also tell, end-user-wise, what applications end-users are using and how long they're using them for. And while we don't necessarily know what they're doing, at the same time we kind of do know what they're doing. We know what websites they're going to, so we understand how they're utilizing the internet connection.

When it comes to identifying where we are experiencing performance issues using the TrafficInsights feature, I'm actually working on that right now, for the comptroller of our company. It's mainly about trying to get her to call me when it actually happens so I can log in and see it. This is the first time I've used it to diagnose an actual connection problem.

Auvik's network discovery capabilities are pretty fast. The biggest thing is that you have to commit to SNMP. You have to turn that on so that you can get the layer below. From a ping perspective, it does a great job of discovering devices on the network, once you have pointed it at the right entry point. You have to commit to a few protocols to open up the network so that it will get to the levels below the surface, where you're actually pulling information, data, logging, et cetera. If you really want to manage the network, you do have to open up a few protocols.

It also automatically updates network topology. It has a great map view of everything so that you can see all the connection points and the health of a connection. You can say whether it's a ping or if you have the right protocols set up so that you can pull in information. It's very easy to quickly see, from a graph, where you need to possibly address setup issues. The other thing that is great about the highlighting is when you have unknown devices on the network. They will come up and you can quickly filter for them in a very easy-to-use table. That way, you can tackle if they really are unknown devices or if somebody is trying to do something they shouldn't.

It's rare, but sometimes the actual application itself can be a little slow. That's because of the amount of data that it is pulling from remote networks. That has been my only complaint with it and it's really not even a complaint. But if the speed of the application were to improve, it would help a lot.

We've been using Auvik since December, so it's been about six months.

They do really well with the availability of the application. When they need to take maintenance windows, unless it's emergency maintenance, which I've only seen one time, they always have a backup. That means it's pretty much available all the time. We've never had a problem with it going down, ever.

It's pretty scalable. It's always easy to add on another visible device. Depending on how you decide to set up your network, you're going to pull in anything that isn't a piece of that main entry point. From a pricing standpoint, that part's good. 

Their technical support has been crazy good. A challenge for us, if we wanted to consider leaving the product, is just how good they are. Not only were they engaged from the beginning—even as easy as it was—but they guided us through and showed us different tools. They gave us multiple workshops. And even after those workshops we've had quarterly follow-up.

They really want you to use the product. It's not even a partnership issue. Rather, you can just tell they love what they do. It's definitely one of the better relationships I've come across in the last 20-something years of IT. That made the decision to go with them really easy for us. We felt really good about it after as well.

They're also very open to feedback and to looking at what that can lead to in terms of development and enhancing of their product. They've done so much reaching out to us. We have nothing but great things to say about them.

They definitely work with us. They don't just say, "Here, we sold you a product." They want us to get the most out of it, and that's what changes it to a partnership-type relationship.

We didn't have anything before Auvik, and it's helped out immensely.

There are a couple of tricky things to set up. You've got to know the equipment that you're running, but once you know that and you work alongside Auvik and use their Knowledge Base, it's extremely easy to set up. We had ours up and running in a day and we had it fine-tuned in a couple of months.

As a cloud-based solution, other than troubleshooting, there's barely any maintenance on our side. A lot of it is just the initial setup, such as getting a site running, and even that doesn't take that much time. You can have a site up and running and loaded in 30 minutes or less, if you know what you're doing. It's very straightforward, very easy to use, a lot of it is point-and-click. Once you've set up a few sites, you tend to know it like I know the back of my hand. It's super-easy for me to set stuff up.

We worked with an Auvik technical engineer. They had a deployment roadmap that we followed, and typically, every other week we were going through the different features and functions. We would set up a meeting to go over, for example, setting up SNMP and SSH login and turning on TrafficInsights. They helped us tune it to the way that we needed to use it.

The time-to-value ratio, for us, was day one. We had nothing before Auvik, so as soon as we got the product up and going, we were already seeing the networks through the discovery services. After a session of a few hours, we started to understand the SNMP and how to set things up and pull in a lot more of the logging and alerting, detailed information regarding the traffic. Within two to four hours, on top of the discovery stuff, we were off to the races. We quickly discovered versions and where we were from an asset-management perspective. We could see older equipment that we had, and we were able to quickly target a hardware refresh. The time-to-value was almost instant.

It's great for small businesses, but when you start reviewing the pricing model, depending on how many devices, and what sub-devices you decide to pull in, it can get tricky as far as the pricing goes. 

For us, as a mid-sized organization, it works great. There are some functions and features that you might get from a Meraki or from SolarWinds that, if you have a more robust networking team or a security team, might be useful, and Auvik might get passed over for an enterprise-grade solution. That said, Auvik is phenomenal for us. It's great for what we use it for. It gives us a very powerful tool at a very cost-effective price point for our size of an organization.

We have 20 to 25 billable devices. In terms of endpoints, we at least have 250 machines and there are a bunch of printers that we've got alerting on, and other miscellaneous devices that are connected to networks.

The challenge might be for a more robust network, where you start putting in a lot of billable devices. There's going to be a point where this solution would potentially be more expensive than some of the enterprise solutions, just because of the billing structure. Auvik could potentially price itself out of large organizations because of how it does billable devices and lose out to solutions that not only have more robust services but that price things out differently.

We have looked at a couple of open-source, network monitoring solutions, but they weren't as robust as this. NinjaRMM was one of the solutions we looked at. We pretty much just chose Auvik and moved forward with it. 

The strength of Auvik, and many of the tools at its price point, are the out-of-the-box monitoring capabilities. Where Auvik pulls ahead is when you set up SNMP and you're able to scan the layer details and information from all the devices underneath. That's when you're really going to start getting more of the robustness it offers, whether it's TrafficInsights or it's the asset management that comes from having a network monitoring tool. That's definitely where it comes out ahead. Ninja RMM, for example, is just giving you a high-level inventory of what it sees on the network. It probably wouldn't give you much more than a Lansweeper or the like.

My recommendation is that even if you have network experience, their product is vendor-neutral, so pay attention to the way that they do things. Even though it is specific to them, it's very easy to get used to the way that they have everything laid out.

Take advantage of the training sessions and of all the meetings. Go through the certification course that they have and pay attention to the Knowledge Base. Everything that they have done shows that they actually care about what they're doing and what they like doing. They are there to help. They will bend over backward to help you.

It does configuration backups and it takes them automatically. I also do those on the side as well, manually. In the event that something does happen, it's always better to have a backup. We've got backups for everything. We haven't come across any issues where we've had to use the configuration backups yet.

It does its job well. I would rate it at nine out of 10. I'm a little bit more network-driven, so a lot of the things it can do are fun, for me. I probably enjoy it more than anybody else on the team. 

You can definitely tell that this solution is younger than some others. It definitely knows its niche. It gave us everything we needed, to the point where I could rate it an 11 out of 10. But if I start to look at SolarWinds and some of the other names out there, some integration capability to do all the clicks within the service would probably be the next improvement that I would want. But if you ask for those, it may price itself out of where it's at now, which is a really great spot.

I don't see us leaving it for quite some time for sure.